


Devotion Not Diminished

by Jenwryn



Category: Death Note
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Romance, Threesome - M/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-01-16
Updated: 2009-01-16
Packaged: 2017-10-02 07:01:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jenwryn/pseuds/Jenwryn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fifty one-sentence fics, mostly AU. Simplest explanation? Matt, Mello and Near live together for some unknown reason, adore each other for obvious reasons, bicker, need, and, apparently, paint Mello's nails black...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Devotion Not Diminished

**Author's Note:**

> The prompts for these are from LJ's 1sentence community, specifically their Alpha Table. Thanks also go to passthebutter (who I originally got the idea of doing this from) and Tierfal, both of whom who put up with me nattering about this on AIM. It's Matt's PoV, which means that the "you" is his perspective.

**#01 – Comfort **  
You argue, more than anything else, the three of you – so much bickering, and thrown objects, and wrangling over games and guns and guesswork – but there's a certain relief to it all, a security, because you know that the anger never lasts, but the rest of it does.

**#02 – Kiss**  
Once upon a time, you'd shied away from kisses, but Mello has always revelled in them, and Near needs to be touched to know he's wanted, and so you get over yourself, and learn.

**#03 – Soft**  
You wonder sometimes, late at night, and early in the mornings, what other people would say if they looked at the two boy-men curled in the bed on either side of you, tangled up in the sheets and their own limbs, one with his hand on your hip, one with his leg hooked over your ankle, as though that were what keeps them from the path to nightmares: you wonder what an outsider would see, but all you know is soft hair and trembling lashes, and the way it makes your heart stutter.

**#04 – Pain  
**Prescience isn't really prophecy, you theorise, it's more like... understanding the present so well that you can guess at what's going to come in the future... but, in this case, it doesn't take a psychic to know that it's probably going to hurt.

**#05 – Potatoes**  
The kitchen is a mess, hell, the whole apartment is a mess, but even you can't take it any longer when Mello shows you the room he's been pretending to cook in (potato peels? does he even _eat _potatoes? really?), and you glare at him, and ask whether he really wants to die of something horrible, and then demands he go and borrow cleaning stuff from the old lady next-door who, oddly enough, seems to be fond of the blond hellion.

**#06 – Rain**  
The day that Near arrived in Los Angeles, the world had been painted grey, water slid and hissed in the gutters, and the knock on the door was small and soft and damp.

**#07 – Chocolate**  
Black nails amongst white hair, Mello pretends to read the paper whilst he toys with the boy seated on the ground before him, and the silver-wrapped block makes crinkling noises where it's balanced on his knee; you decide that you can die this once when the enemy attacks, turn your attention away from mowing down zombies, and lean in for a kiss; the very _air_ is sweet with chocolate.

**#08 – Happiness**  
You knew peace, as a child, as a boy, growing up in the bubble that was Wammy's House, never as competitive as they wished you to be, but contented, because you'd already gotten what you wanted and you wonder, sometimes, with your hands drowning in the washing-up, whether this is why you don't argue quite as much as the other two: because your dream's already here, and you're living it.

**#09 – Telephone**  
That day, when your cellphone rang, you'd been miles away, but it hadn't mattered; you'd have gone to him if you'd been on the other side of the ocean.

**#10 – Ears**  
Mello's beauty is blazing, every inch of him, every angle, and the first day he let you take him, let you claim as yours that which you'd ached after for so long, you'd just held him in your arms and were at a loss as to which part of him to worship first; he actually burst out laughing when you leant in and nibbled at his earlobe.

**#11 – Name**  
He comes home late; you can sense the anger, put your game away, raise your eyes, and there he is, throwing himself onto your lap, rough, fists clutching, imbued with the smoke that comes with the mafia, eyes locked on yours, so much rage, hisses your name, and demands you kiss him: this is his version of _how was your day?_ and somehow you don't know where you'd be without it.

**#12 – Sensual**  
At three AM, with the laptop still glowing before you, and the codes sending your vision double, you sometimes get to thinking about the complexities of a relationship crazy enough to build itself around three strong-willed men, but you never get to ponder it long because, by three-oh-five, Near's socked feet are padding down the hall, and he wraps his hands at your elbow, and pulls you away to bed.

**#13 – Death**  
You don't remember ever being told that people die, that's something that others seem to need to learn but you, you just knew; you've always known.

**#14 – Sex**  
Hands, mouths, hips and hard muscles, _god you can't even think anymore, _the world is colour and light and flavour, and three writhing bodies, and you make them moan and push, and they do the same to you, and reason flies out the window at the sound of love made tangible.

**#15 – Touch**  
Near has never been all that good with words or, perhaps, he's always been _too _good – he's the master of small, catty comments that know just how to scald the flesh – which is why sometimes, when the two of them slide from mocking to dangerously sharp-edged, you have to resort to less subtle forms of distractions, and put your hands to use...

**#16 – Weakness**  
Fulfilment as deep as this is an Achilles heel; if something were to break your triumvirate, you'll cease to exist.

**#17 – Tears**  
Near sat and he cried, in the window seat, that first day after Mello deserted you both and, when you wiped his tears away, and he snuffled and snotted on your shirt, and you found that you didn't mind at all, you realised that things were even more complex than you'd thought...

**#18 – Speed**  
The car, beneath your loving touch, purrs down the highways and the backstreets like a thing of dangerous beauty.

**#19 – Wind**  
There was a field behind Wammy's House where you used to play football in the long summer evenings, but sometimes you went there on your own, hands deep in your pockets and gameboy left indoors, and just let the wind stroke your face, and wondered where it was going to.

**#20 – Freedom**  
There is no such thing as liberty, free will, or equal human rights – there is only ambition, hate, revenge and, if the cosmos is indulging in particularly black humour, love.

**#21 – Life**  
Blood in your veins and pulsing, _ache and throb_, curl of veins at wrists, heart in a thousand places all at once; this is living.

**#22 – Jealousy**  
Sometimes, just sometimes, three is a crowd.

**#23 – Hands**  
Two thumbs tapping quickly at buttons, small white fingers holding cups of dice, slender nails scraping on silver paper; this is your universe.

**#24 – Taste**  
There are days when you think they'd probably never eat properly if you didn't see to it yourself, not that you particularly _want_ to play mother, but there are also days when you can't think of anything better than kicking back with a can of drink, watching Mello devour nutella pizza, and Near wrinkle his nose in disgust...

**#25 – Devotion**  
Wise men have declared that the heart can only be shared between two, but the poets know better, and there are no limits, only inside your mind, and the devotion is not diminished by adding another, but is trebled instead.

**#26 – Forever**  
Regardless of how you look at it, when Mello promises _forever, _you know he has no great expectations about how long that time will last, but you know just as certainly that he means it.

**#27 – Blood**  
You come home, on your birthday, to find Near in the kitchen, red specks of salty blood smeared down his shirt, and a tea-towel wrapped around his fingers – you swear at him for being so fucking helpless with the little things in life, but he's smart enough to know that that's your fear speaking, and you help him finish making dinner, in silence, because he wants so hard to do it right.

**#28 – Sickness**  
Five days stuck in bed with a fever, and the two of them turn into cautious angels in their desire to see you well again.

**#29 – Melody**  
He'd been in the apartment three whole weeks – had already been in your shared bed for one and a half of them – before Near had had the confidence to sing while he showered, and the sound of it stunned you and Mello into breathless silence.

**#30 – Star**  
Mello lays on his back, on the roof, and watches you smoke: “Make a wish,” he instructs, but you just exhale, and grin.

**#31 – Home**  
You came home the day you met them.

**#32 – Confusion**  
There was so much noise, in the orphanage – children talking, and teachers, and the general chaos caused by the kitten that L had allowed Parker to keep (against Wammy's better judgement) – but, in amongst it all, there was also a small boy dressed in white, and sometimes he'd let you help with his puzzles, even though you both knew he didn't need it.

**#33 – Fear**  
“I don't want you to go,” you'd muttered at your feet, as though your shoes were the ones talking about leaving, not Mello; he'd just looked at the door, and hadn't answered, but reached out one of his hands, and pushed you in Near's direction.

**#34 - Lightning/Thunder**  
Four AM, and the world explodes into a ball of fizzing electricity and booming drum-beats; the small body, snuggled between you both, trembles despite its grown-up shape and the pale fuzz at its chin, so the two of you just curl closer, and allow him his dignity by pretending not to notice the way his hands grip tight as if you two were the only things to keep him grounded.

**#35 – Bonds**  
The woman in the park, with the pink jogging pants, stares, aghast, at the boy asleep between you (she probably thinks he's under-age), one of his hands curled tightly in one each of yours, but you raise your free hand before Mello can snap out something vulgar, and simply drawl, “At least we're not dating your daughter.”

**#36 – Market**  
Two months after Near arrived, Mello got out of the black market: when the man tried to protest the matter, Mello had just glared with dangerous eyes, and explained that he had a family now.

**#37 – Technology**  
There isn't much more beautiful than winning the final boss battle, though the other two might beg to differ.

**#38 – Gift**  
Christmas, and you don't think Near's eyes have ever been wider – he's like a little kid in a candy store, except, no, that's more how Mello seems: and you just sit back and grin at the both of them.

**#39 – Smile**  
Mello comes up behind you, when you have soap suds to your elbows, smacks your arse with a damp teatowel, and kisses slow kisses down your neck; Near just smirks as he takes off his coat at the front door, and comes to help Mello torment you.

**#40 – Innocence**  
Sometimes taking that pale body, taking it in every sense of the word, your hands gripping at Near's slender hips, his back pushing up against you as you press in deeper, deeper – _god_, sometimes taking him seems like sacrilege, but his low-groaned moans make you wonder which of you was originally more innocent.

**#41 – Completion**  
Hands, hands, sweat at your upper lip, back taut, moth open, contorted mask of climax on your face (you refused a mirror in the bedroom), hands, hands, o_hmyfuckinggodNearMelgodyes--_

**#42 – Clouds**  
When you were small, the summers were long, and Mello could see dragons and pirate ships in the clouds that pushed their way across the sky, above the fields behind the orphanage.

**#43 – Sky**  
“It goes kind of... greenish... if there's going to lightning,” muses Near, but Mello just snickers and whispers in your ear, “So does he...”

**#44 – Heaven**  
“Some days I don't believe there's anywhere good to go when we die,” mutters Mello over the rim of a mug of hot cocoa, his back pressed up against the softly humming heater.

**#45 – Hell**  
“But I never have any doubt that there's a hell,” he adds; you don't ask him where he thinks this love-thing you all share will land him.

**#46 – Sun**  
It was summer, and you were thirteen years, seven months, and two days old, and up to your knees in the salt water of a foreign ocean, the first time that Mello crept up behind you, his hands warm and wild and tickling, and somehow ended up with his lips on yours.

**#47 – Moon**  
You aren't sure if Near kissed him first, or if he kissed Near, and you don't ask because it honestly doesn't matter, but you _do_ know that, three days after he arrived at the apartment, it was Near who found you, and it was Near who curled cautious fingers against your face in the moonlight, and it was Near who crept in closer until his tongue touched your lips...

**#48 – Waves**  
The beach is cool at your toes, and you smile at Mello, and know he's remembering the same memories that you are, and your eyes meet for a moment or two before Near shifts in the middle of his grey sand-castle, curious, and you murmur wickedly, “Shall we show him how it was that first time?”

**#49 – Hair**  
It's not exactly a secret that you have a bit of a thing for beautiful hair – not that you give a rat's arse about your own – but there's something... something about the scent of Mello's hair brushing silky against your skin as you press your face into it from behind, softly scented with a flavour surely only found in the women's aisle at the supermarket; and there's something about Near, Near looking up at you from beneath Mello, one thumb in his bangs even as his eyes widen-darken-shine with every thrust of your body, ever thrust of Mello's body, every motion shared...

**#50 - Supernova**  
The sheets are slightly damp, your hair is crooked in your eyes, and Near and Mello are bickering with each other from opposite sides of your body, their hands spread over your bare chest as they make their points, and you close your eyes a moment to catch breath (how do they argue even at a time like this?), inhale, then ensnare a jawline in each of your hands, and whisper gruffly, “I love you idiots”, and the silence that falls, and the way they slide in against you, warm and hot and damp-lipped, and mouth their answers against your lips, the two of them, _I love you too_; and every time, every time it's like the stars are dying and being reborn...


End file.
